When Soviet President Konstantin Chernenko died, a hastily
called meeting of the CPSU Politburo voted five against to elect Mikhail
Gorbachev as his successor. Coincidentally (?) three opponents of Gorbachev in
the Politburo, among whom was Grigori Romanov, were out of town and not present
at this all-important meeting and were not notified to come immediately.

Grigori Romanov once
was a powerful figure at the highest level of the Soviet State. As a young man
during the 1940’s he had fought the Nazi invaders in the defense of Leningrad.
A committed Communist, he later rose trough the Party ranks to become the head
of the Soviet Union’s second largest city, Leningrad, for a period of 25
years.

In 1983 he was summoned to Moscow by the then president Yuri
Andropov and became a member of the CPSU Politburo. When Andropov died in 1984,
Konstantin Chernenko took over. But he too was not healthy and passed away the
following year. Grigori Romanov was considered one of the two possible
successors to Chernenko; the other one was Vladimir Shcherbitsky. "No
one seriously considered Gorbachev," says Romanov.(1)

On the day that Chernenko died (March 10, 1985–19.20
hrs) Romanov was in Vilnius, Lithuania with his wife. They had been given a
trip to the sanatorium and could only fly back to Moscow on the following day.
Two other Politburo members were also at that time out of town; Dinmuhammed
Kunaev was in Alma Ata, Kazakhstan and Shcherbitsky was in the United States. If
these three members (the usual size of thePolitburo is about 14 full
members) had been present at the meeting, as they could have been the
following day – Gorbachev would never had been elected, says Romanov. "By
the time we arrived in Moscow, the very next day, he’d already done it without
waiting for us as Politburo rules demanded. That fast! That was it… He’d
already cut the deal in secret with all of them. And you think that the timing
of Chernenko’s death, I mean, was all accidental? (bid).

The fact that Gorbachev was not even seriously considered as
the successor to Chernenko, appears to be supported by an article in 1992 in the
New York Transfer News Service,(2) which wrote the
following about Gorbachev’s performance:

"When Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary
of the CPSU, he had done little to distinguish himself with his comrades in the
Central Committee or later in the Politburo. The highest-ranking job he held was
that of a Central Committee secretary in charge of agriculture. He had earlier
studied at the Stavropol Agricultural Institute where he obtained a degree in
agriculture, to which he later added a degree in law. Thus, he was a lawyer and
an agricultural official directly responsible from the Central Committee to the
Politburo. His performance until then was, if anything, lackluster. Indeed, his
last years in that post were characterized by agricultural failures attributed
by the Soviet press to poor weather (!) They certainly did not add to his
stature. Nothing he had done could recommend putting him on a pedestal above all
the others."

Furthermore, an article in "Time Europe"
of January 4, 1988, confirms that Romanov was the chief candidate for the top
job.

But Gorbachev and his cabal appeared to have outmaneuvered
his rivals. He succeeded because Chernenko died at a moment that his main rivals
were out of town, either by pure luck or timing or "in a planned
manner", as Romanov seems to suggest by his question – "Was the
real timing of Chernenko’s death accidental?" There is no doubt that
Chernenko was a sick man which he spent much of his last few months in hospital
and that his death was not unexpected. The Soviet news agency TASS later
released the text of his medical bulletin, which stated the following "following
the manifestations of liver and pulmonary-cardiac insufficiency, Mr. Chernenko’s
heart had stopped." But doctors do have a good deal control over the
timing of a person’s death. Romanov could be right that the timing was not
altogether "accidental".

Tom Paine,(3) writing
in the "ColdWar Series: Ten Years After" said about
Gorbachev: " In order to trump his Politburo rivals, Gorbachev did every
wild thing that he could think of, the better to be able to brand them all,
quite inaccurately, as reactionaries, as Stalinists. In the process he ruined
the Soviet economy, encouraged the nationalities to rise up against his enemies,
and inadvertently(4) broke up the Soviet
bloc in the attempt to remove Communist leaders who sided with his perceived
enemies in Russia. Finally he started the process of breaking up the Soviet
Union itself, in April of 1991, by initiating talks on a new Union Treaty. This
was done in order to head off an attempt by the loyal members of Central
Committee of the CPSU to remove him from power."

Not surprisingly, Romanov does not have a good word to say
about Gorbachev. " He will pay for his sins! I can’t stand the sight
of his pig’s mug. He’s a traitor A traitor to the Motherland! He’s
sniveling about how no one here thanks him, about how ungrateful Russians are to
him. To hell with Gorbachev! He started this disaster. He was a catastrophe, an
ignorant peasant who had no right to come into the big city…" (1)

And so writes Andrew Meier in "Black Earth":
"Now, in advanced retirement, far from his rarefied life among the
Party, Romanov echoed the lament of many a common man in Russia. In the years
after the Soviet collapse, he had found company. Romanov has no power now, but
he took solace in the knowledge that millions of Russians share his views. His
principle conviction – things were much better before – has become the motto
of his generation."

(1) From the
book "Black Earth", chapter 1-5 by Andrew Meier
(2)NY Transfer News Service 1992, article by Sam Marcy: The Collapse of
the USSR and the Destiny of Socialism"
(3) Tom Paine is publisher of a Public Internet Journal
(4) Personally I don’t believe that the break-up of the USSR was
"accidental". Rather, it was planned by Gorbachev and Yakovlev and
others for many years. (W.V.R.)